Join Me As I Waste My Life By Playing Spectrum Text Adventures

You will make your way to a GERMAN CAMP from which you must escape with the the secret ROCKET FUEL PLANS. It is known that these are kept in a strong SAFE but the exact location of this is not known.

Some assistance may be provided by a GERMAN GUARD called SCHMIDT who is a DOUBLE agent so "SCOTCH" may be of some use if you meet him!!"

I've noticed that not all of the games are in English. My Swedish isn't really up to completing adventure games, so I guess I'll have to skip them.

I think I'm close to finishing 1942.

I'm not sure cheating on random mazes is a good principle :(

Would you like to try again? Y/N"

Why the hell would I want to try again? I SUCCEEDED.

Pretty poor show, really. The parser didn't recognise TAKE (had to use GET). There was no smart-aleck reply when I told it to FUCK OFF. The puzzles mostly consisted of doing things in the correct order, without a great deal of logic. Shooting the dog was the wrong thing to do. The Nazis were crap. Ho hum. Still, adventures were you have a set goal rather than point collection are easier to solve, I think.

Phorward.

"YOU have been banished from the Kingdom of Ryzar. To re-gain citizenship (erm, in a Kingdom I'd be a subject, not a citizen, I think) you have decided to go and search for the legendary Five Treasures of Ryzar.

To do this you will enter the five different levels that are found beneath Ryzar. Each level contains one of the treasures."

Couldn't I just go and live somewhere else?

"Do you want Olde English character set?"

No, I'd like to keep my sight please.

It gave me a Red Screen of Death and re-started itself. I'm glad I got that swearing in early.

This passed for humour in 1984.

The navigation is near impossible, I'm proceeding by guesswork. This game is batshit.

Two things - if he gets stuck in the Sea of Holes, this thread will tend towards infinity…

…and the game is bugged, so you can't become a Real Person (although with the hand of Morley, you might suspect that's somewhat intentional).

I can remember how to complete Behind Closed Doors (a text adventure about being locked in the toilet - ah Zenobi, how we miss you), so er, let me know when the Bs roll around!

Anyway, for forty-five goddamn minutes I took this thing seriously:

(JETLAG WILLY, THERE ARE SPOILERS COMING UP.)

No, really, I was trying. I even was making a map:

ihttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v69/eyeball_kicks/Hampsteadmap.jpg

Anyway, I effortlessly went round the house that you start in, found a tracksuit and wore it (I mean I worked out you had to type "TAKE TRAC" before you typed "WEAR TRAC"). I then left the house, was flummoxed by a locked garden shed "KICK THE DOOR DOWN", but on the street outside was consistently met with this:

"You have been mugged. A nasty gang of thugs have kicked your head in...You will never make HAMPSTEAD without transport".

So there had to be transport in the flaming shed, and I had to find a bloody key. In the first room there was "A T.V. SHOWING 3.2.1". I tried "EXAM TV," "SWITCH OFF TV", "TAKE TV", SMASH TV", "LOOK ON TOP OF TV", and "LOOK BEHIND TV". Nothing.

So I tried "EXAM TRACKSUIT", "REMOVE TRACKSUIT" and "EXAM TRACKSUIT", "EXAM POCKETS", and "WEAR TRACKSUIT" and "EXAM POCKETS".

In the kitchen, I tried EXAMing the TABLE, the SINK, everything. I tried typing "THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE MY HOUSE AND I WOULD KNOW WHERE I PUT THE FUCKING KEY". No use.

So I CHEATED, and looked up the answer on the internet.

It seemed I had TO EXAM the LOUNGE itself and get a UB40, and EXAM the KITCHEN itself to get the key.

In the shed I got a BIKE, which took me past the thugs, and I went to the D.H.S.S. IT WOULDN'T LET ME IN WITH THE BLOODY BIKE, so I had to go outside, DROP BIKE, in this landscape where your game ends for daft reasons you can just DROP BIKE and pick up later. Anywhere there was a queue to sign on. I typed "QUEUE". I typed "SIGN ON". Nothing worked. Fuck this.

I CHEATED again.

You had to type "JOIN QUEUE". They gave me a giro. "TAKE GIRO". To the post-office. "NO BLOODY BIKES ALLOWED", leave, "DROP BIKE", enter again, "CASH GIRO". A Pakistani gives you two ten-pound notes. "TAKE NOTES". Outside, "TAKE BIKE".

Turf Accountants. "NO FUCKING BIKES!" Leave, "DROP BIKE"...I know how to word things by now. "PLACE BET". Yeah, "You lose as usual". Outside, "TAKE BIKE".

The newsagents. "BIKE!" Some "girly mags" on the shelves that you probably have to buy for some arbitrary reason. Except no money left cos I typed "PLACE BET" once.

I was bored and stopped.

Just think, in a couple of days you might have finished every Spectrum text adventure ever to start with a numerical character.

I fear that some adventures may be a little soul destroying - one of the Scott Adams games requires you to pretty much guess the verb 'hyperventilate' WITHIN THE FIRST SIX GOES.

BUT Good Luck! Rely on this thread for some moral support, eh? I'll be here for as long as you are.

I demand you start this back up, if only to play The Pawn.

The caveat is that I don't have a load of free time at the moment, and am about to go to Glastonbury, so if its to be a race, we'll need more contestants. Either that, or hold off for a bit.

www.gb64.com , for instance.

I completed The Hobbit, BBC version! Or did you mean that they can't be done because they have random bits which will make everyone's game a bit different? Anyway, roll-on the campaign (other thread)

Was browsing through many issues of YS yesterday online, and it was pretty sad reading the last several issues and seeing the quantity of games for the speccy just drop during the last 1992/93 period.

But did notice that Zenobi software just kept on producing those text adventures month after month.

I've been going to a London Python programming meet-up this year where one of the tasks is to write a 80s-style text adventure in Python. How about that for wasting your life.

haha it sounds interesting to me, and i don't think it's as wasteful as spending all sunday reading magazines from the 80's

If I could just settle on 1 pointless way to waste my life then at least I might get quite good at that thing. 1980s Text Adventures are 90 percent impossible without cheating, is my theory tho.